Luca Barbato @lu_zero_
Research is not taking money and then creative-write whatever fits the political faction you align with.And that’s why there are at least some people, that value science a lot, that consider burning down or starve “institutions” the correct first step to amend course.
One of those people is me.
I can still keenly remember my first feelings of crushing disappointment back in the 1980s when I started reading the “scientific” literature on gun policy and realized how utterly fraudulent much of it was.
I had grown up loving The Science, thinking of research scientists as the best of humanity, carrying us forward into a better future with honesty and courage. Discovering that there were people who would violate this sacred trust to push a political agenda hurt me.
But it only started with the gun policy literature. Sociology, psychology, political “science”, climatology. Learning how far the rot had spread was deeply dispiriting to me.
And the worst of it wasn’t even the hacks and partisans. The worst was noticing the cowardice of the people who failed to oppose them. Because that part isn’t just an indictment of the successful activists and manipulators, it’s an indictment of almost all scientists, everywhere.
Which is why I now contemplate rude, ignorant populists proposing to burn down large swathes of research funding and find myself rooting for the populists, not the scientists.
Because the lesson needs to be learned. It’s not just about driving out the hacks and partisans. Scientists, as a culture, need to learn the hard way that cowardice has a price — that if you don’t call out politicization when it’s happening, you don’t deserve the trust of the rest of our society, or the funding and privileges that come with it.
ESR, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2025-12-21.
Update, 23 March: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
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